Wireless networks employ transmission techniques that enable reliable communications over a channel that can experience impairments such as frequency selective fading, thermal noise, and interference from nearby communicating sources that transmit on overlapping times and frequencies. Spread spectrum techniques such as frequency hopping (FH) and direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) help to combat these effects by spreading the signal across a wide frequency range, thus providing frequency and interferer diversity according to the amount of spreading.
From one transmission time interval to the next, FH, in particular, hops the transmission across a set of narrowband frequency carriers (or frequencies as termed henceforth) distributed over a wide spectral range. The frequency hop sequence defines the sequence of frequencies over which the device will transmit. In general, pseudo-random frequency hop sequences are employed to achieve both interferer and fading diversity gains. The duration over which the transmitter remains on a given frequency is known as the dwell interval. The receiver is assumed to be aware of the hopping sequence and must be time synchronized within the dwell interval. Realizations of pseudo random frequency hopping, referred to henceforth as random frequency hopping (RFH) are known to provide interferer and fading diversity gains and have been implemented in both commercial cellular (e.g., GSM) and military (e.g., SINCGARS) systems alike.
RFH has certain limitations, however. For instance, if the dwell interval is short, the transmitter may hop to the next frequency even if the receiver is experiencing good conditions on the current frequency and poor channel conditions (e.g., deep fade or excessive interference) on the next hop. If the dwell interval is long, the transmitter may remain on the current frequency even when conditions have degraded.